Jihad Denial Syndrome

Guy Rodgers, executive director of ACT! for America, wrote a blog post on The Hill's Congress Blog. He wrote:

See no jihad. Hear no jihad. Speak no jihad.

This sums up the Obama administration’s national security assessment regarding our ongoing conflict with global Islamic jihad. Unfortunately for us, it seems they have come down with a severe case of Jihad Denial Syndrome (JDS).

Americans were tipped off to this when the Pentagon released its report on the Fort Hood jihadist attack. The mountains of evidence, including Nidal Hasan screaming “Allahu Akbar” as he fired away, indisputably revealed that Hasan was motivated by the ideology of jihad.

Yet the body of the Pentagon report achieves the remarkable feat of avoiding a single mention of “radical Islam,” “jihad” or any similar reference.

The recent National Security Strategy document affirmed that what happened in the Ft. Hood report was no accident or oversight. Stripped from the document were all references to radical Islam as a factor in the increasing number of terrorist attacks attempted against the United States.

Then came Attorney General Eric Holder’s tongue-tied response to U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith’s simple question about the recent spate of terrorist incidents asking if Holder “believe[d] these individuals might have been incited to take the actions they did because of radical Islam?”

As if affirming the obvious might instantly turn him into a leper, Holder couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that radical Islam might have ever been a part of the motivation behind these attacks.

When pressed, he referred to Anwar al-Awlaki’s views as a “version of Islam that is not consistent with it…”

On June 4, Todd Rosenblum, deputy undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, made a similar argument at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

According to a report in Congressional Quarterly, he “…defended the Obama administration’s decision to avoid using terms such as `jihadist’ or `Islamist’ to describe the enemy in the war on terrorism, saying such descriptions legitimize the rhetoric of criminals and extremists while denigrating true Islam.”

This echoed what Obama counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan said in a recent speech: “Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists.”

There can be no doubt: The Obama administration has made it official policy to silence any reference to “jihad,” “radical Islam” or any related term by officials in its justice, defense, intelligence and counterterrorism branches.

This goes beyond political correctness. This is Jihad Denial Syndrome, an obsessive denial of reality that will encourage more terrorism and put America at greater risk.

Read the whole article: Jihad Denial Syndrome.